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' un. .. , , , , '. ...... . : :: :-::: -::x;:= ?: :-:=- <<t;;J :; :;:; ...." . ;%:=:'" . ::, öj r.x== *-,: I"":": : re. , !"" :, ' .'.; æ . r II @:, ; =:=Y'::; . : :,.. :=::::::: .,1 '",,!1 ; ; ; . .' < " . ;:: .: :Y- . =:; " ;< ""__k :":,\<( ;'::1. ;" ':s}':" }[ ,:,,<< . '1'm a Reagan Republican. That's probably why I smile and wave for no reason. " . story, Vera Stravinsky, while visiting Auden's apartment on St. Mark's Place, found what she thought was a bowl of dirty water on the bathroom floor and flushed it down the toilet, only to dis- cover that it was, in fact, a chocolate pudding she was to have been served for dessert. Edward Mendelson recently sat down in the couple's extremely neat Upper West Side kitchen ("When you finally achieve a modus vivendi with your kitchen, you have been accultur- ated"-"Home Comforts," page 103), poured coffee into attractive earthen- ware cups ("When you have visitors in your home for more than a few min- utes, hospitality calls for you to offer them refreshment"-page 70), and dis- cussed the poet's reputation for slob- bishness, which, he insisted, has been exaggerated. "The reports of Auden's horrible housekeeping tend to come from deeply fastidious people, like the Stravinskys, who carried around their own medicine chest," he said. "His home 48 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 20 2000 . was cozy: I know a lot of people never seemed to notice that it was messy." Contrary to an account offered by Rob- ert Craft, Stravinsky's protégé and biog- rapher, of having a drink chez Auden- Craft says that one first had to find a glass and empty it of cigarette butts- Mendelson said, "Cups were not used for ashtrays. An ashtray was displayed. It was a Vesuvius of cigarette butts, but it h " was an as tray. Mendelson admitted, though, that Auden's apartment was dirty: When he first visited St. Mark's Place, in the late sixties, "There were cracks in the glass on the dining-room table, and all the cracks were filled with crumbs." Clearly, Auden had not learned the lesson on page 60 of Mrs. Mendelson's book: "You can brush the crumbs into a tray used for that purpose or into a plate." Auden would hkely not have cared for the book's bedroom guidelines, either, which admonish, on page 663, "Don't put bags, purses, briefcases, shoes, and similar things on the bed; they have been on too many floors, sidewalks, and other questionable places." "Auden liked heavy weight on the bed," Men- delson said. "Many visitors have reported coming in and finding that Auden had piled the rug on the bed, as well as the blankets." Nor, it seems, would the ad- vice on page 104-"When you are cook- ing something complicated, there is nothing like being surrounded by towering heaps of food-encrusted bowls and pots to give you a panicky feeling"-have got much attention in the Auden household. "In the summer of 1972, I went to visit Auden in his house in Austria," Mendelson said. "There were papers strewn all over, and the kitchen was an appalling mess of dirty dishes, out of which Chester Kall- man"-Auden's longtime companion- "produced this staggeringly delicious turkey-and-veal sausage. I was struck by the degree of amazingly delicate cuisine that came out of this messy kitchen, which I suppose is the analogue of the poems coming out of the messy household. " Auden once told Edmund Wilson that he hated living in such disorder but that it was the only way he could work. If his shade were to come back and visit the Mendelson home, it would likely have to throw a few books and pots around in order to produce any poetry. The book-lined apartment is sprawling and light-filled and very tidy, though not oppressively so. A cleaning lady comes in for about four hours a week, but otherwise the Mendelsons do the chores, and they save many of the worst ones, like scrubbing the kitchen floor, for themselves. In spite of Cheryl Mendelson's as- cendance as a kind of Martha Stewart for the Ph.D. set, Edward Mendelson claims that he was the more fastidious of the pair when they first met, a decade ago. "I had an Indian bedspread, the pat- tern of which included a rectangle that was exacdy the same size as the bed, and I was very particular about insuring that the pattern lined up correcdy with the edges of the bed," he said, smiling at the follies of bachelorhood. That bedspread, he added, is long gone. Then Professor Mendelson offered more coffee, and, it seemed, an inward thanksgiving for a habitat of his own. -Rebecca Mead